This one starts off promising but begins to lag around a third in as the main characters kick their frustrations around in a circle for a while. It picks up towards the end, though, with some plot twists and some action that made me sit up and pay attention again. I'm giving it three stars out of five because there is a decent thriller to be told here, only it's spread out over too many pages. The pacing is uneven: the plot is put on hold for large chunks of the book to make way for sequences that focus solely on character development.

The latter, though, is where true strength of this crime novel and is obviously what most of the effort went into. There are two main characters, a psychologist and a police inspector, both of which are fairly well developed in their anguishing about the creeping ruination of their lives. They are thrown together and strike up a serendipitous friendship (somewhat rushed), feeling united in their shared feeling of dissatisfaction. Neither of them sees a way out, and consequently they are too apathetic to act on sudden changes. There's failed marriages here, workplace sexism, childhood traumas, sexual frustration, trust issues and a plethora of dysfunctional families. Both main characters simply have too much to deal with in their personal lives to habndle their jobs, a case involving child abuse, child soldiers, and a serial child killer, to the point where they feel slightly redundant and underused, as if the authors weren't really interested either.

I'll certainly read the next instalment in the series, to see where Jerker and Axlander Sundquist take their characters, but if the pacing doesn't improve I'm not sure if I'll want to read the third (and final) book. ( )